


Seeing is Believing

by lonely_lovebird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Because the author is unoriginal, Canon through 3.09, Developing Relationship, Gen, Sheriff's first name is John, Werewolf Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 05:24:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonely_lovebird/pseuds/lonely_lovebird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being rescued from the Darach, Sheriff Stilinski finds himself in the hospital with too much time to think. It's only after a conversation with Melissa McCall that things start to change - this time for the better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing is Believing

It’s only when he’s in the hospital that he really has time to think. Stiles comes in and gives him food he wouldn’t ordinarily have because he knows his father hates hospital food, but besides asking how he’s feeling and what the nurses have said, Stiles is oddly quiet.

But he gives his father a look that the Sheriff doesn't need interpreted.

It’s when he’s alone that all the memories begin to play in his head on repeat. Of Stiles in his bedroom with a labelled chessboard, of Stiles’ face when he blows his top in the lobby of the very same hospital in which he is now residing, of Stiles’ voice, broken and soft.

"Mom would have believed me."

He lets a sigh drag itself from between his lips. Yeah, his wife would have believed his son. Hell, she’d have probably figured it out by now, rather than turning a blind eye like he had done. The incident in the station last year, when he’d been knocked out, and waking to see Melissa’s face, a mask of shock.

He could only imagine now that the real reason was because she had just discovered her son was a werewolf.

God, werewolves were real, and Scott was a werewolf, and so was Derek, and his son was running around practising Druid magic, and Deaton was some kind of wizard guide for lost teenagers and werewolves.

That word was never going to sound okay.

Munching on his now cold curly fries, he thinks about how his late wife would have reacted. She had loved all the fanciful tales of faeries and magic and had a faith in them her husband had never quite mustered. He indulged his wife and son with their games at the park, playing pretend, that Stiles was a monster, and he had captured his mother as a hostage and it was his father’s job to rescue her.

"Like a princess, daddy!" he can hear his six year old son’s voice shout petulantly from the worn out carousel in the park. The metal creaks under the weight of his wife sitting up and giving him a sharp look.

"Rescue me, please, dear?"

And his heart hurts, her voice in his head still full of life and love, warm and smooth. Her hair is honey colored in the setting sun and her eyes shine up at him like the ocean, ever changing but always blue.

He doesn't notice the machine tethered to him in the bleak hospital room register his heart’s pain as he drowns in the memory of what life was before he lost his wife and his son.

He wonders if Stiles will forgive him.

He wonders if he will ever forgive Stiles.

The door opens and there’s a warm, tan hand on his arm.

"Sheriff?" The voice is soothing, like aloe over a burn, and Melissa McCall is sitting in the chair next to the bed, face full of concern. She’s dressed in a pair of light blue scrubs and has a stethoscope slung around her neck. Her face is tired and there are shadows under her eyes from the events leading up to the Sheriff’s current hospitalization.

His voice breaks. “Melissa."

She gives him a sweet smile and squeezes his arm. She doesn’t have to say anything before he’s working on spilling his thoughts like he’s drawing poison from a wound.

"How can you live, knowing this? How can you look at Scott, at Isaac, at Stiles, and feel okay? I feel as if everything in the world is a lie. The Hale fire, Kate Argent, the endless killings, the endless mystery, the secrecy and the suspicious behavior."

His son’s erratic behavior as if his father had stumbled upon something he shouldn’t know.

Then there was Derek Hale, the scapegoat.

And the disappearance of Peter Hale, the dead and now not-so-dead. His dead nurse found in the trunk of a car in a parking garage.

The sudden departure of Gerard Argent after his streak as Beacon Hills High School Principle.

Chris Argent’s wife…

"How can you handle knowing all of this?"

Her hair wispily brushes his arm as she leans in close. It’s not a threatening move, not from Melissa McCall. She smiles, her eyes full of warmth that he’d been missing. Her hand squeezes his for a moment before she finally takes a breath.

"I had to remember that Scott is still my son. He’s still the goofy sixteen year old with a horrible crush on Allison Argent. He’s still a poor student and a lacrosse player. His best friend is still Stiles. But now he’s got responsibilities I’d never imagined. He has a strength I could never give him. But he’s also got a second family."

The Sheriff feels her sentence as keenly as a blow to the gut.

"He has Isaac and Allison and Lydia and Stiles. And sometimes he has Derek. He has Deaton and if there’s anything I can honestly say, I wanted Scott to have a worthy father figure and I think he’s finally found one in his werewolf mentor."

That one was like a bucket of ice water being poured on his head, the word flying so flippantly from her lips as if it was something normal a mother would say about her child.

"But it is hard. He doesn’t tell me everything, but he tells me what I need to know. And he takes care of me." She smiles at a private thought. “Isaac takes care of me. Stiles takes care of me." She moves away, and the loss of her presence is a keen sting.

"And they take care of you, whether you know it or not."

The Sheriff shakes his head. “I can’t wrap my head around this." He gives Melissa a long side look. She’s appraising him, as if wondering if his denial could become a possible threat to her son. “But I want to," he concedes.

The smile that lights her face burns right through him.

"I’m more than willing to help any way I can, Sheriff. I’m willing to help anyone with a pretty face." He feels as if a pair of invisible shackles have been lifted from his wrists, a weight off his body in such a way that he feels liberated. He smiles back, just as genuine.

"John, please." He glances around the hospital room. “And when ever I get to leave, would you like to maybe go for coffee?"

"Coffee would be great, John."


End file.
